On world literature

The definition of ‘world literature' has been a keenly debated one ever since Goethe proclaimed in 1827 that the ‘epoch of world literature is at hand’. This paper enters the debate by bringing the conclusion of Ludwig Boltzmann's work on entropy into conversation with contemporary ideas about literature – about Literature proper, national literature and, in the end, world literature. If entropy describes the inevitability of an organized system becoming disorganized over time, then my rather simple claim is that world literature is nothing more than a description of the entropy of national literature. Put another way, world literature is a description of the process by which texts inevitably escape the boundaries of national literature; it is the rush of ‘disorder' that one witnesses as an ordered system is put to flight. In order to elucidate this idea, I draw on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.Keywords: GoetheDeleuzeentropyworld literatureglobalization Notes1 David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 1.2 John Blackmore (ed.), Ludwig Boltzmann: His Later Life and Philosophy, 1900–1906 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), p. 5.3 Following the work of others, most notably Rudolf Clausius, Boltzmann argued that the entropy associated with a system in equilibrium is proportional to the logarithm of the number of microstates which form the macrostate of the equilibrium. This not only made a strong case for the existence of particles; it also showed that entropy is inherent to any thermodynamic system and that it can only increase over time. Put simply, any thermodynamic system inevitably tends towards ‘disorder'. For a more rigorous explanation, see Andreas Greven, Gerhard Keller, and Gerald Warnecke (eds), Entropy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).4 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, translated by M.B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. xii.5 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I, translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 4.6 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 64.7 Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 2.8 Of course, much of Kristeva's work on Bakhtin talks about the distinction between the object and event of literature. It is, though, I think Barthes who gives the most pedestrian account of this split in his discussion of the difference between the ‘literary work’ and the ‘literary text'. See, Roland Barthes, ‘Theory of the Text’ in Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 31–47.9 Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ in Toril Moi (ed.) and translated by Alice Jardine, Thomas Gora, and Leon S. Roudiez, The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 34–61 (37).10 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 143.11 Ibid., p. 143.12 Ibid., p. 148.13 Ibid., p. 148.14 Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 213.15 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, p. 159.16 Derek Attridge, J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 9.17 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1986), p. 9.18 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983); Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation Homi’ in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 291–322; Simon During, ‘Literature – Nationalism's Other? The Case for Revision’ in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 138–153; Timothy Brennan, ‘The National Longing for Form’ in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 44–70.19 Agostinho Neto, ‘Concerning National Culture’, Ideologies and Literature II, 10 (1979), pp. 12–15 (12).20 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, p. xi.21 Barthes, Image-Music-Text, p. 159.22 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, translated by Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1987), p. 4.23 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, translated by Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam, and Eliot Ross Albert (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 36.24 Ibid., p. 36.25 Ibid., pp. 36–37.26 I say ‘mischievously’ here because I am not at all convinced that Deleuze really thinks about literature in this polarized way – particularly French literature. After all, he wrote at length and enthusiastically on the French writer Marcel Proust. See Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, translated by Richard Howard (London: Athlone, 2000).27 Daniel Smith, ‘Introduction’ in Essays Critical and Clinical by Gilles Deleuze, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), pp. xi–liii (xl).28 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 36.29 Sarah Lawall, ‘Introduction’ in Sarah Lawall (ed.), Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), pp. 1–64 (20–32).30 Franco Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ in Christopher Prendergast (ed.), Debating World Literature (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 148–163 (149).31 Claudio Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, translated by Cola Franzen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 38.32 Moretti, ‘Conjectures', p. 149.33 Ibid., p. 151.34 Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, p. 14.35 Erich Auerbach, ‘Philology and Weltliteratur’, The Centennial Review, 13.1 (1969), pp. 1–17 (2).36 John Pizer, ‘Goethe's “World Literature” Paradigm and Contemporary Cultural Globalization’, Comparative Literature, 52.3 (2000), pp. 213–227 (213).37 Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 1.38 Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), p. 8.39 See Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Literature and Society in Late Nineteenth-Century Brazil (London: Verso, 1992); Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference (London: Routledge, 1998).40 See Michael Swanton, ‘Introduction to Beowulf’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 1–26.41 See Robert Lewis, ‘The English Fabliau Tradition and Chaucer's “Miller's Tale”’, Modern Philology, 79.3 (1982), pp. 241–255.42 See Henrik Birnbaum, On Medieval and Renaissance Slavic Writing: Selected Essays (The Hague: Mouton, 1974).43 For example, a four-page pamphlet makes sense only if the pages are ordered in the traditional manner – one though four. However, the pamphlet can be organized in 23 other ways, even though each of these other arrangements is considered ‘disorganized'. That is to say, the ‘correct’ order is merely one state among 24 possible states.44 Damrosch, What is World Literature? p. 292.45 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), p. 107.46 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 9.47 See Brian Massumi, ‘Translator's Foreword’ in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Scizphrenia II by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, translated by Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1997), pp. ix–xv (xiii).48 Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy (New York: Longman, 1985 [1994]), p. 1.49 William Boyd, ‘Introduction’ in Sozaboy by Ken Saro-Wiwa (New York: Longman, 1985 [1994]), pp. i–v (v).50 Wai Chee Dimock, ‘Literature for the Planet’, PMLA, 116.1 (2001), pp. 173–188 (174).51 In a minor aside, Dimock writes, ‘Mandelstam's Dante is, in fact, a strange figure, often unrecognized to others’ (p. 179). This, though, amplifies my earlier claim that it is the reader who brings the written work into existence. In essence, Dimock is showing here that Mandelstam created his own Dante.52 Dimock, ‘Literature for the Planet', p. 178.53 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 2.54 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 239.55 See Osip Mandelstam, ‘The Stalin Epigram’ in Selected Poems, edited and translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).56 It seems clear that Osip Mandelstam's wife, Nadezhda, safeguarded her husband's poems by committing them to memory. See Dimock, ‘Literature for the Planet', p. 173.57 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 232.58 Rosi Braidotti, ‘The Ethics of Becoming Imperceptible’ in Constantin V. Boundas (ed.), Deleuze and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 133–159 (156).59 Pizer, ‘Goethe's “World Literature”', p. 215

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